Mission and Vision

The Missions and Vision statements will typically already exist when an architecture program is set up or a Business Architecture is commenced, but there will be some cases where they do not or the mission statement exists but the vision statement is not available. These two very simple statements have different purposes. A mission statement describes the line of business the organization undertakes and what its purpose is. The vision statement is like a summary of the organization's goals or a synopsis of the strategic plan; it describes where the organization wants to be in the future and what its aspirations are.

These two statements are useful to include in a Business Architecture as they provide a very brief and crisp definition of what the organization is and where it wants to be. The business goals should link back to the vision statement, providing a traceability to the fundamental strategic direction of the organization.

Enterprise Architect allows both the mission and the vision statements to be modeled using the UML Extension mechanism of stereotypes, and these statements can be included in diagrams and related to other elements such as Goals and, in turn, to Objectives. These diagrams are compelling for senior executives and line managers, who can see clearly that the architecture work and the subsequent implementation initiatives can be traced back to the strategic primitives.